Category: Red Hat Mobile Application Platform

Introduction

As you may already know, the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP) is available as a self-administered, on-premise, installation as well as a hosted platform. This offers more opportunities for customers to benefit from increased security, flexibility and control over their platform.

Note: This installation is strictly for sandbox demonstration purposes. In the interests of simplicity, it will be running on infrastructure that will not be secure so no confidential data should be stored in this instance.

Introduction

New Relic is an application-monitoring platform that provides in-depth analytics and analysis for applications regardless of the type of environment where they are deployed, or as New Relic put it themselves:

You might ask why there’s a use for New Relic’s monitoring capabilities when Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP) and OpenShift Container Platform both offer insights into the CPU, Disk, Memory, and general resource utilization of your server-side applications. While these generic resource reports are valuable, they might not offer the detail required to debug a specific issue. Since New Relic is built as an analytics platform from the ground up it is capable of providing unique insights into the specific runtime of your applications. For example, the JavaScript code deployed in Node.js applications is run using the V8 JavaScript engine which has a life-cycle that can have a significant impact on the performance of your application depending on how you’ve written it. Utilizing New Relic’s Node.js module provides a real-time view of V8 engine performance and how they might be affecting the performance of your production application. By using this data, you can refine your application code to reduce memory usage, which in turn can free CPU resources due to less frequent garbage collections. Neat!

Following the blog post series, today, finally we have Part 2, this chapter tries to explain in an easy way how to debug your hybrid app using the Safari web inspector.

As you know sometimes debugging a mobile app on a mobile device can be hard work, for Android and Web pages we have the Chrome Developer tools, this has been an extended way to do it, Part 3 of the blog post series will cover this method, for iOS we have something similar, called the Safari web inspector.

As of its release 2.19, the Red Hat Mobile JavaScript Client SDK contains a TypeScript definition file. By providing type definitions our JavaScript SDK can easily be used in applications developed using TypeScript. As a developer with a few years of JavaScript experience, I was initially skeptical of TypeScript, but after using it for a short period, I’m not sure how I ever managed without it! In this post, I take a look at the benefits TypeScript offers and demonstrate how you can get up and running with an application written in TypeScript on the Red Hat Mobile Application Platform.

How do customers build an end-to-end IoT solution using commercial grade, open source products? This is the question we (Patrick Steiner, Maggie Hu and I) wanted to address with our session at the Red Hat Summit, Boston. The end-to-end solution is based on three-tier Enterprise IoT Architecture, which integrates IoT data with existing business processes and the human element.

Getting up and running with local development for Red Hat Mobile Application requires that you run MongoDB and Redis locally. Doing so isn’t particularly difficult if you follow online guides, but it would be much more straightforward if you could just get these pieces of software up and running in a single command and not need to worry about versioning, creating data directories, setting permissions, and compiling some things such as Redis from source. It would be even better if you could easily switch versions. This is where containers shine.

In the next few paragraphs, we’ll demonstrate how you can run any almost any version of MongoDB and Redis with a single command on a machine that has the Docker service installed.

NOTE: This is not an extensive Docker CLI tutorial; just enough to learn basic commands that will allow you to get MongoDB and Redis up and running easily.

RHMAP Environments

An RHMAP Environment provides a Node.js runtime for Mobile Backends. There are 2 environment types: Dynofarm & OpenShift. The former is an LXC based PaaS, written in Node.js & bash. It is superseded by OpenShift environments. However, there are still many Dynofarm environments in use in the RHMAP SaaS offering.